US: Rutgers University Senate proposes plan to fight back against Trump measures
The Rutgers University Senate is urging the university president to formally propose and assist with establishing a shared legal and financial defence agreement for a consortium of 18 universities to withstand what they say are attacks on higher education institutions by the Trump administration.
The proposal for a “Mutual Defense Compact” was lodged on Friday to defend “academic freedom, institutional integrity and research enterprise”.
It is the first known attempt by universities to band together to resist financial, legal and political assaults by the Trump administration on things such as university autonomy, academic freedom and scientific research.
The proposal asserts that recent “politically motivated actions by governmental bodies pose a significant threat to the foundational principles of American higher education”. It proposes that all member institutions give or share a defence fund to be used for immediate "strategic support" to any member institution under political or legal infringement.
In 1958, the Big Ten Academic Alliance was established by the presidents of the Big Ten Conference members, an athletic league, to be an academic counterpart. Initially known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the consortium's name was changed to the Big Ten Academic Alliance in 2016 to better reflect the organisation's mission.
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Despite what the name infers, the Big Ten Academic Alliance is made up of 18 research universities and 600,000 students.
Members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance include the University of Illinois; Indiana University; University of Iowa; University of Maryland; University of Michigan; Michigan State University; University of Minnesota; University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Northwestern University; Ohio State University; University of Oregon; Pennsylvania State University; Purdue University; Rutgers University-New Brunswick; University of California Los Angeles; University of Southern California; University of Washington; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Censorship continues
Meta on Monday disabled the pro-Palestinian Columbia University Apartheid Divest’s (Cuad) Instagram account for the second time with "no option for appeal", the student coalition announced. Meta said the account “doesn’t follow our community standards”.
Cuad describes itself as “a coalition of student organizations that see Palestine as the vanguard for our collective liberation” and a “continuation of the Vietnam anti-war movement and the movement to divest from apartheid South Africa”.
The Instagram account, which had 51 000 followers, provides updates on student activism at Columbia and what is happening in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
Meta permanently banned Columbia’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter’s Instagram (@SJPColumbia) account in August.
Meanwhile, the University of Pittsburgh temporarily suspended the SJP chapter from its campus in March, according to a report in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. This means that SJP cannot host events or request funds from the university while suspended.
In a letter to SJP, associate director of student conduct Jamey Mentzer did not specify when the suspension could be lifted and cited potential student code of conduct violations over a “liberation study group” hosted by SJP in December, which university officials say did not comply with university event policies.
The SJP chapters at the Universities of Michigan, Tufts, the University of California Los Angeles, and Rutgers have also been suspended, as university administrations crack down on student activism on Palestine.
NYU cancels Doctors Without Borders talk
Dr Joanne Liu, former international head of humanitarian medical care at Doctors Without Borders, said a presentation, which was due to take place at the NYU Langone medical centre in New York City on 19 March, was cancelled on 18 March after the university reviewed Liu's slides and told her that her presentation could be “could be perceived as antisemitic” and “anti-governmental” during an interview with CTV News.
Liu, a pediatric emergency physician at Sainte-Justine hospital and a professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, told CTV news on Thursday that she received a call from the school’s vice-chair of the education department, who voiced concerns about the content of some of her slides, including those discussing cuts at USAID, and ones mentioning humanitarian worker casualties in Gaza as a result of Israel’s war on the territory.
Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care physician who works with Doctors Without Borders, told Middle East Eye that her experience is part of a concerted effort.
“It's part of a very clear pattern to silence anybody that speaks the truth about this. It's the same pattern that we saw with international journalists being denied entry into Gaza, the same pattern we saw with Palestinian journalists being intentionally targeted, killed, discredited."
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